Micello Blog: Indoor Cartography

Just in time for the busiest shopping season of the year, Sears has partnered with Micello, the leading provider in indoor maps, to offer detailed in-store maps on its mobile site.

Integrated into Sear’s complete mobile solution, shoppers will be able to effortlessly shop by departments, find hot deals and coupons, cross-check local ad, share and purchase gift cards, order products (layaway also available) , and finally navigate their way across large multi-level Sears department stores.

Upon opening up m.sears.com, shoppers will can access the map of their neighborhood Sears store, by navigating to the Store Finder option in the menu bar.

Sears has made great strides in revamping their mobile presence and now, with the addition of a powerful indoor mapping SDK that gives them the ability to update maps with product search, indoor location based advertising, and displaying various objects on top of the maps, Sears is poised to offer a proactive mobile solution that users can use without having to download any native applications onto their phones.

With the addition of mobile-ready store maps, Sears hopes to boost consumer engagement, and find new methods for monetization that has since gone uncaptured. Millions of dollars of untapped revenue is lost in brick-and-mortar stores, largely due to the fact that customers cannot always find the products they are looking for. With the inclusion of Micello’s indoor mapping platform, Sears will seamlessly bridge the gap between online and brick-and-mortar stores.

Expect some awesome new upgrades to Sear’s store maps over the coming years as Micello is also constantly improving and building upon their extensive SDK. Micello is delivering its services to Sears via Micello’s enterprise-grade indoor mapping SDK, which has powered other large mapping projects for companies such as, TomTom, Nokia, Walmart, Westfield, Zenrin, Bally Technologies, Pitney Bowes and more.

Since offering an indoor mapping SaaS platform, Micello has become the premier indoor mapping SDK for some of the biggest names across multiple industries. Stadiums, hospitals, conferences, business campuses, property owners and retail have all expressed an interest in indoor location based services. Due to Micello’s flexible SDK, which allows enterprises to retain full control over the application and map, companies like Sears have found Micello’s technology to be quite easy to integrate into internal tools that are usually already in place without having to chain themselves to third party platforms.

“We’re excited to be partnering with Sears, the global leader in retail shopping. Our integration into Sear’s mobile technologies means that Sears’ shoppers can now find their products easier and quicker than ever before. And we hope to see awesome advancements in indoor-location based services that will continue to benefit shoppers across the board,” noted Micello CEO, Ankit Agarwal.

We’re very excited to see what the future holds for our partnership with Sears. Harnessing the power of Micello’s powerful SDK, we have no doubt that Sears has just become a serious contender in the mobile retail sector.

Discover more with icons groups

Adding new bold colors to our icons allow icons to instantly come to life against the softness of the building background. In addition to bold icon colors, icons within the same ‘family’ are now grouped together by their colors which makes finding purple escalators and green ATM icons easier than ever before.

Enhanced Icon Definition

Take your POIs to a whole new level with enhanced icons that have undergone a subtle, yet powerful transformation. Building amenities such as ATMs, public restrooms, restaurants and even level change icons have been redefined with soft and flat colors that clash nicely with darker strokes, ensuring users to know exactly where these services are while in large venues, such as shopping malls, airports, casinos and even stadiums.

Read easier with sleek fonts

Fonts play an important role when it comes to indoor mapping in that specific font types and font sizes can be easier to read. So naturally, we scaled back the font so that more store names appear instantly upon loading the map. We’ve also removed the capitalization so that fonts appear like regular readable text. And lastly, we reformatted the font type with a grey Helvetica font type to modernize the text in a subtle way.

Beautiful Stunning Colors

By using non-clashing colors that aim to compliment each other, we’ve created a design that users will want to stare at. Combined with the subtleties of softness and flatness, our maps can now easily fit in almost any well designed application with minimal design work. Building Backgrounds, Stores, Gates, Shelves, Bins, Walls, Restrooms and so much more have all gotten new colors that users will find easy to recognize and interact with.

Soft Shadows & Textures

We recognize a lot of users love the ability to include textures and shadows on various objects throughout the map, so we’ve gone ahead and kept this functionality in the SDK. In the new theme, we’ve gone ahead and hid these features to match with a more modern flat design look. Taking advantage of soft complimentary colors that don’t create unwanted noise to the eye, the new design has all the attractiveness of 2014 design techniques, with the power needed for displaying objects that are harder to define, like grass and water.

Of course, these are just some of the ways we’ve designed the map to create a more modern theme. However, we still allow developers to completely customize the look and feel of the map to match any specific design their application has. In fact, we encourage developers to try their hand at redesigning the maps so that they can get a full picture of how powerful the SDK truly is. If you’re interested in indoor maps, check out our www.micello.com/start. To keep up to date on all the latest indoor mapping news, visit www.micello.com/blog.

We were excited to learn about the brand-new release of a revolutionary technology that will aim to put a stop to the horrors of losing precious battery life to the powerful forces of GPS. We’ve all been there; You're in a rush to get somewhere and need your GPS to help you out, but you’re battery is running dangerously low. Finally, there is a company that is poised to put an end to that pesky battery-draining GPS. The company is called PathSense, and they claim to provide GPS comparable accuracy, but with 90% less battery drain. We truly believe this effort is an enormous advancement in location technology and PathSense couldn’t have chosen a better time to release their SDK to developers.

The Carlsbad, CA company, is planning on releasing a their SDK for free for developers and license the technology for high-usage developers. Currently, developers can access the beta release of the SDK for iOS and Android apps. PathSense may also offer premium accounts on top of the traditional free SDK in the future. With just a few lines of code, developers can easily replace their location service code with the sample code found on PathSense’s homepage

PathSense recently showcased their technology that had been in development for the last two years at DEMO Conference 2014 and has since received quite a lot of well-deserved press. Micello fans will probably recall our launch at DEMOFall 2009 five years ago! :)

PathSense is lead by founder Pete Tenereillo, who has been a Silicon Valley veteran in the LBS space for a while now. Tenereillo began development of PathSense following the sale of his previous social navigation platform, Trapster, to NAVTEQ back in 2010.

As this technology continues to advance, we’ll definitely be keeping tabs on it and one-day hope to see this battery-saving GPS transition indoors.

Make sure to stay up-to-date- on all the latest indoor mapping news by visiting our Getting Started page, www.micello.com/start. To find the latest news on the entire indoor wayfinding industry, check out www.micello.com/blog.

It’s hard to believe that we are just around the corner from the holidays. With Thanksgiving and Black Friday quickly approaching, we thought that we’d help out all of you shoppers out there with the must have list of technologies to take with you to help your shopping experience go much smoother this year. Even if you’re not the Black Friday type, these tools are just great to have all year long.

MicelloRetail & Shopping Mall Maps- Of course, we’ve made the list. Our full collection of over 20,000 indoor maps are sure to help you find all the specific stores, products, airport gates and anything else you’re looking for on Friday morning. With maps of all major airports, shopping malls, stadiums, colleges, and retailers, Micello’s indoor maps are definitely a must have. And before you think you don’t need a map to find the new TV section in a department store, think again. Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year. So busy in fact, many retailers have to strategically place advertised black-friday products in hidden areas throughout the store to avoid major traffic build ups in one portion of the store. So who do you think will get the new TV hiding in the outdoor patio section? The person with the Micello map displaying the correct TV location, or the person without one? Better play it safe: www.micello.com/places

Shop Your Way - For those of you who may be wanting to add a touch of technology to their shopping, Shop-your-Way is an app that will do just that. If you plan on checking out Sears, or Kmart this year, the Shop-Your-Way allows you to get exclusive member prices, find clothing, chat with your store rep, and even purchase your favorite gifts right from the comfort of the app, which then becomes available for in-store pickup. Make sure to pick this handy little application up on Google Play, or the iOS App Store.

TGI Black Friday App - TGI Black Friday is a very interesting application for those of you who love to keep track of all their Black-Friday deals and coupons. This cool little app allows users to create personalized shopping lists based on their favorite holiday gift ideas. What's even cooler about this application is the ability to brag to all your friends about the awesome deals you’re picking up on the hottest shopping day of the year. With all that is mind, there is no doubt that this app is essential to have in your arsenal for the big day! This app is available for both Google Play & iOS App Store.

Black Friday App - Don’t let the name fool you on this notable application. The Black Friday application is essential for the avid black-friday shopper. With products from major retailers, such as Macy’s, Black Friday lets users browse through tons of product images and reviews to help them make the perfect gift decision. I might add that the app creators Fat Wallet gave it a pretty cool looking redesign that is sure to knock your socks off. This app is available for both Google Play & iOS App Store.

Westfield.com.au - This is for our friends who will be traveling "down-under" this Black-Friday. Equipped with enhanced Micello mall maps, this web tool allows users to browse a virtual shopping mall in order to shop from the comfort of their own home, or phone. Once you find the exact products you’re looking for, this tool will show you exactly where it is, inside the mall. Oh, and don’t forget to show off what an awesome item you’ve just bought with their seamless social media integration. Westfield has also incorporated interactive mall maps into their iOS application to help users instantly find the stores they are looking for, without the stress of wondering through the mall.

If you’re looking to avoid the wait and begin turning your hectic Black-Friday shopping experience into a easy mobile occasion, make sure to check out the first step in the process by having a beautiful, accurate indoor map of your favorite store. To learn more, check out www.micello.com/start. And make sure to stay up to date on all the latest infoor wayfinding news at www.micello.com/blog.

Micello’s partners CSR is making big waves yet again, as the company announces the release of SiRFusion,™ a sophisticated indoor positioning SDK that is tackling the indoors for Android smartphone users. Through the release of SiRFusion,™ CSR is hoping to power a whole new generation of indoor location based applications for the Android market.

What excites us about the launch of SiRFusion,™ is the ability to deliver these innovative LBS services without the costly process of surveys and retrofitting infrastructure. By combining WiFi signals, pedestrian dead reckoning, satellite positioning and CSR’s cloud based indoor positioning, CSR is poised to make indoor navigation a part of everyday life.

SiRFusion™ utilizes the power of the masses by automatically crowdsourcing a venue’s WiFi access points as they shop. What’s more is that SiRFusion™ is enginnered to incorporate future positioning technologies such as, Bluetooth® Smart beacons, Wi-Fi Round Trip Time (RTT), and Indoor Messaging System (IMES).

Anthony Murray, Senior Vice President, Business Group at CSR, commented in CSR’s November 20 Press Release, “Offering indoor positioning accurate enough to be useful has been a challenge that the industry has been trying to solve for many year. But with consumers coming to expect anytime-anywhere positioning wherever they are, our customers have continued to express a growing interest for accurate indoor positioning without the need for additional infrastructure. With our SiRFusion Software Development Kit, we have, for the first time, made indoor location a reality for developers who want to deliver innovative location-based products and services without proprietary infrastructure.”

The SDK will be available for Android developers in Q1 2015 and can be found at www.csr.com. Developers will be given access to the SiRFusion™ library, API descriptions, and a Developer’s Guide.

Of course, every great indoor-positioning SDK needs a well designed indoor map SDK to really harness the power of e-commerce and analytics. By coupling indoor positioning with our enterprise-grade indoor maps, developers can have the power to not only show you where you’re standing in the mall, but they will also be able to display the information in a well-designed and interactive format, that they control. Because of our demonstrated performance with CSR, we’re proud of the milestones they are reaching within this space and continue to wish them future success.

Make sure to stay up-to-date- on all the latest indoor mapping news by visiting our Getting Started page, www.micello.com/start. To find the latest news on the entire indoor wayfinding industry, check out www.micello.com/blog.

We recently came across an article by Bruce Krulwich that discussed the overall impact that the Qualcomm acquisition of CSR will have, not just on the internet of things (IoT), but also on the entire mobile indoor location industry as a whole.

With the announcement of this huge deal back in mid-October, we’ve been following this deal to see how this will work to alter the movement toward connecting just about everything to the internet. In addition to Qualcomm, other chip companies like ARM have also made recent acquisition deals related to the internet of things, and we will most likely continue to see these kinds of deals more often as the IoT market is poised to become even bigger than the smartphone market.

While the IoT is looking to be a big factor behind this deal, Krulwich also feels as though another market may have also been on the mind of Qualcomm at the time of the deal; the mobile indoor location industry.

One point that has been often overlooked by various media sources is the benefit that CSR will bring to Qualcomm’s mobile location technologies. Specifically, Qualcomm’s manufactured indoor location chips, IZat.

IZat, which are already available on over 3 billion devices, are chips that claim to give mobile users the ability to see your location, friends, and deals within your immediate area.

What does this mean for the mobile indoor location industry as a whole? We feel this represents a shifting trend in solving the indoor positioning puzzle at the hardware level. Other companies that also have begun manufacturing indoor-location chips include Broadcom, and Invensense who recently acquired Micello indoor positioning partners, Movea and Trusted Positioning.

Currently, Qualcomm’s IZat chips only work in Korea and other areas that provide Qualcomm with enough location information to be accurate. However, Krulwich predicts CSR’s Mobile SLAM to change all that!

As of today, the current state of the indoor positioning market utilizes two main approaches to plot a user’s location on an indoor map. The first approach involves bluetooth beacons, WiFi access-points, radio signals, magnetic fields or a combination of these technologies to gather a database of radio footprints which read and recognize the signal strengths at any location to get a unique fingerprint for that exact location. In this space, we’ve worked with many different companies that have developed these kinds of technologies, which also requires this fingerprint database to be calibrated and gathered manually at every location in order for it to scale.

The second approach, called Sensor Fusion, makes use of the sensors built into the phone to find it’s location indoors. A phone’s gyroscope, compass, accelerometer, and barometer can all be used to track changes in a user’s location and altitude. However, because these sensor technologies are still relatively new, errors in the location can be common whenever there is an obstruction, or magnetic pulse that throws theses sensors off.

With both of these two approaches available, CSR development of a third type called, Mobile SLAM, aims to create a hybrid solution that first uses sensor fusion to track a user’s location, but then utilizes data from a fingerprint database to filter out errors in the location output. Over time, the positioning system will continue to record the fingerprint data and automatically learn a new site based on this.

If Qualcomm decides to use CSR’s SLAM technology in their iZat chips, there is no limit to the possibility of having indoor-positioning built in to your next smart-phone purchase. If the word “SLAM” sounds familiar to you, it may be from Apple’s acquisition of WiFi SLAM a while back that led many to predict Apple will eventually release their own SLAM technology.

As noted by Krulwich,

“If Qualcomm does succeed in incorporating CSR's SLAM technology into IZAT, their chips may power the next generation of indoor location technology in a wide variety of smartphones, mobile devices and IoT devices. This would truly be a grand SLAM for both companies.”

We’re very excited to watch this technology continue to advance and become available for as many users as possible. As far as Micello, we’ll just continue to focus on building accurate and stunning indoor maps for these technologies to be plotted on. To learn more about indoor mapping, check out www.micello.com/start. To keep up to date on all the latest indoor wayfinding news, visit www.micello.com/blog.

Finding an open seat in an conference room just got a whole lot easier. This was the first thought that began to circle the Micello office when we learned that Micello’s French partner, MySeat, was bringing their revolutionary technology to the United States. MySeat, who’s been live for various companies in the suburbs of Paris, offers a complete space management solution that involves placing a sensor underneath every chair for recording daily analytics and occupancy. The data is then displayed in a beautiful dashboard interface which includes a visual Micello map of every seat in the building. So whether you’re a student looking for a few open chairs in the library, a gym club member wanting to avoid the rush hours on the treadmills, or an employee wanting to know which conference rooms are open, MySeat and Micello are working to enhance the process of finding that open seat for you.

Check out this quick video to see the MySeat technology in action:

Here are just some of the ways companies are collaborating more efficiently by managing their workspace with MySeat:

Save up to 30% of space

“Let’s say you have 10 meeting rooms. If you observe that the occupation rate of these 10 meeting rooms never goes beyond 80%, then you can allocate two meeting rooms to another use. By freeing spaces in different floors and sites, you might even free enough space to be able to remove one floor from your rental contract. You can also sublease free spaces.”

Employees collaborate more efficiently and save time

“A very common question is: “Is there any free seat/meeting room?” or “Should I go to this floor/site or this one?” Mobility is not always easy. Thanks to MySeat, workers can know remotely whether seats are available or not. Stop wandering.”

If you’re looking to start managing your workspace analytics and offer employees a way to collaborate more efficiently and faster, make sure to visit http://myseatoccupancy.com/ To begin the first step in the process by having a beautiful, accurate indoor map of your campus, check out www.micello.com/start. And make sure to stay up to date on all the latest indoor wayfinding news at www.micello.com/blog.

We’ve thought long and hard about where our place is in the growing indoor location sector. During this time, we’ve recognized that the enterprise market has almost been overlooked by the wave of indoor-mapping excitement. In fact, we believe that the enterprise indoor map market has the potential to shape the entire indoor mapping industry, one application at a time. A few weeks ago, we shared why some of the biggest industry names love Micello, but here are just a few points that led leading brands into ultimately choosing Micello’s powerful SDK:

Pop-ups

Ultimately the goal is to get an end user to interact with the map. Whether through a consumer facing application, or internal application, the content that appears when a user clicks on a map can be fully determined by the enterprise. Logos, hours, coupons, social-media, internal data; no matter what you ultimately decides to showcase in a pop-up, Micello’s SDK lets you make the call.

Map Selectors

Navigating an indoor map on mobile can be a tough challenge for the end user without the ability to set specific map selectors on the map. What may be even more challenging is the process of ensuring the same look for the indoor wayfinding aspect to match the overall design of the application. Map orientation, level selectors, and even store directories can be fully customized to provide a uniform design across the whole application. After all, enterprise shouldn’t have the sacrifice their personal creativity when it comes to indoor mapping.

Shadow & Textures

Just as creativity should never be sacrificed, artistic capability shouldn’t either. Underlay shadows on objects for a map that pops, or remove them to offer a flatter and softer design. With textures, developers have the ability to designate alternate areas or natural elements such as streets, grass, sand and water so that their maps can fully come to life.

Colors

Customizable theming capabilities give developers a huge advantage in terms of creativity. Enterprise’s should never be told that brown, blue, or yellow is the only color they can work with. Micello is the only indoor map SDK that gives the developer full discretion to change the color of any object on the map. Our map is your sandbox!

Icons

Icons have a pretty unique role when it comes to indoor maps. Signalling important POIs, such as ATMS, restrooms, level changes, entrances and even handicap access are vital for the end user experience. The ability to add custom icons, as well as removing unneeded ones lets companies dictate the relevant information back to the user in an efficient way. Even setting the colors of icons gives an added ability of choosing bold or soft colors for your icons. Want to make all escalator and stair icons the same color? Want to set different colors for the male and female restrooms? It’s all possible with the strength of Micello’s SDK.

We’re proud to offer one of the most powerful and flexible indoor mapping SDKs on the market. Because we don’t focus on building a complete platform, we can focus our resources as what we’ve always done best; creating accurate indoor maps for the enterprise to take control of. Of course, we’re happy to do some of the heavy lifting if requested, but we like to think our model is fairly innovative. We’d love to discuss how we can retrofit your mobile marketing with the latest indoor-wayfinding technology. Visit www.micello.com/start to learn more today. And to stay up to date on all the latest indoor mapping news, check out www.micello.com/blog.

With the announcement of Apple’s iBeacons last year, the dream of connecting retailers to a user’s nearby location became a very real possibility in the near future. Of course, with any major announcement, the competitive race that follows is also exciting to watch unfold.

Now Samsung has recently announced that they are working with many different system providers in order to provide retailers with their own proximity platform to know exactly where Android users are nearby. Some of the system providers that Samsung is working with include companies like GigaLine, Radius Networks, Roximity and Swirl.

Using Bluetooth Low-energy, which is found in Bluetooth 4.0, are already being included in many of the new smartphones that were sold earlier this year, including Samsungs Galaxy S5 and Note 4.

This will mean that as users begin to upgrade to newer phones in the next couple of years, the release of Samsung’s Proximity Platform will be compatible with new users every year.

As the technology becomes adopted, property managers and stores will be able to send timely discounts, coupons and event notifications to any Android user that walks by. Airports will be able to display current flight information to travelers, museums can display virtual tour functions, sports and music fans can receive event notifications during the event, mall-shoppers can reserve movie seats and much more.

It’s great to see Samsung developing their own proximity platform as this leads to a much larger market for location based technologies.

If you’re looking to avoid the wait and begin interacting with your visitors location today, make sure to check out the first step in the process by building a beautiful, accurate indoor map of your business. To learn more, check out www.micello.com/start. And make sure to stay up to date on all the latest infoor wayfinding news at www.micello.com/blog.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND — sensewhereTM, a leading provider of indoor positioning solutions, is today making its new software development kit available ‘licence free’ to mobile device manufacturers and platform providers. The company has also announced that its partners will have the chance to earn revenue from its crowd-sourced regional location databases.

With the indoor positioning and mobile advertising market growing rapidly, particularly with retailers keen to target customers in-store, sensewhere aims to monetise its regional location databases through services supplied to this multi-million dollar industry. To help accelerate population of its databases, sensewhere intends offering participating mobile device manufacturers and significant platform providers the opportunity to earn up to a 25 per cent share of future revenues from its database.

Available on a ‘nil cost’ basis, sensewhere’s Software Development Kit can be integrated on a mobile device at either the Application layer, the OS layer or embedded in the kernel. There is no requirement to install expensive onsite hardware, such as beacons, or time-consuming surveys, and extensive trials have reported at least 100 per cent better accuracy and more than 50 percent power saving against the best competitor in the category.

sensewhere’s crowd-sourcing technology means that, in contrast to other indoor positioning solutions, the location database coverage quickly becomes universal by virtue simply of the use of sensewhere enabled mobile devices in any geographical location.

sensewhere’s SDK delivers ultra-low power positioning (Lat/Long/Alt) in both online and offline modes by seamlessly integrating the device on-board location services with sensewhere’s database in any location where the software is used.

Rob Palfreyman, sensewhere’s CEO, said: “We believe our cutting edge technology coupled with a no-risk commercial model will radically change the world of indoor location. While other positioning companies measure themselves by number of venues covered, customers equipping their devices with sensewhere can benefit from global venue coverage in a very short period of time with zero cost to build the database.

“Our engineering team has paid great attention to delivering a new SDK which incorporates novel features such as automatic online/offline positioning, sensor integration and low power modes, giving location based applications and services the greatest flexibility and power-performance.”